Relative symbolic links to standard places.

[Buddha Buck <phaedrus@dreamscape.com>]

Today I got bitten again by a facet of Debian/Linux that has a simple 
solution.

At many places in the Debian distribution, symlinks are made from one 
standard location to other standard locations.  A perfect example of 
this is the symlink of /usr/lib/X11 to "../X11R6/lib/X11".  In this 
case, both /usr/lib/X11 and /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 are standard locations 
that aren't likely to move.

In my situation, because of a lack of diskspace, I have /usr/lib and 
/usr/src living on a second hard drive partition, with symlinks from 
both to the appropriate places on the other partition.  

This creates problems with symlinks like the one above, since the 
symlink to "../X11R6/lib/X11" no longer points to the same spot (there 
is no X11R6 subdirectory in /usr/lib/.. on my system, but there is a 
/usr/X11R6).  Attempts to find stuff in /usr/lib/X11 failed until I 
redid the relative symlink to an absolute symlink.

Today, I got bitten by PGP, wanting to find a document in 
/usr/lib/pgp-us/doc, which is symlinked to ../../doc/pgp-us, a location 
that doesn't exist on my system (although the files it wanted were in 
/usr/doc/pgp-us, it couldn't find them).

Is there a reason why these (and other) symlinks are relative, instead 
of absolute?  If so, how can I find them and "fix" them before 
something else on my system breaks because of it?

Thanks.




--
Buddha Buck
85.5 Albany Street
Cazenovia, NY 13035-1216		This Space For Rent
phaedrus@future.dreamscape.com